Peter Hollins - Mental Models

📖 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45027848

MMs

1. Address "Important"; Ignore "Urgent" to separate priorities from impostors
2. Visualize All the Dominoes to make decisions as informed as possible
3. Make Reversible Decisions to remove indecisions and have a bias to action
4. Seek "Satisfiction" to achieve your priorities and ignore what doesn't matter
5. Stay within 40% - 70% to balance information with action
6. Minimize Regret by consulting the future you on decisions
7. Ignore "Black Swans" to understand how outliers shouldn't change your thinking
8. Look for Equilibrium Points to find real patterns in data and not be fooled
9. Wait for the Regression to the Mean to find real patterns in data and not be fooled
10. What Would Bayes Do to calculate probabilities and predict the future based on real events
11. Do It Like Darwin to seek real, honest truth in a situation
12. Think With System 2 to think analytically instead of emotionally
13. Peer Review Your Perspectives to understand the consensus view and why you might differ
14. Find Your Own Flaws to scrutinize yourself before others can
15. Separate Correlation From Causation to understand what truly needs to be addressed to solve a problem

Decision Making For Speed And Context

To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

• Abraham Maslow

A mental model is a blueprint to emphasize important aspects of whatever you're facing, and it defines context, background and direction.

Without them, you are only able to see the haphazard, individual elements with no connection to each other.

A chef is someone who has the mental models of flavor profiles, what basic ingredients are needed for a stock or a sauce, typical techniques for different meats, and the conventional beverage and food pairings.

You can think of mental models as life heuristics or guidelines to evaluate and comprehend.

Mental models aren't perfect representations of the world around us, they serve to separate the signal from the noise for a specific perspective.

Too few mental models limit your capability to comprehend.

MM #9: Wait for the Regression to the Mean to find real patterns in data and not be fooled

Outliers that appear to be patterns or deviations can fools us.

Things tend to go towards their default state over time. A family eats most of their meals at home. Sure, sometimes they might go out for a fancy dinner, have a special event, or even go on a vacation where they eat luxury food every day. In all situations, they will eventually go back to their default.

In any sequence of events that are affected by various conditions, extraordinary events are usually followed by more ordinary, typical ones. So when an aberrant, deviant, or untypical event happens it's much more likely that it won't happen again in a patterned way. Rather, the pattern that's more probable to return is "the usual".

If something extreme, unexpected, or unpredicted happens, wait to see the recovery and the aftermath.

Without an actual basis for a change or extreme event, the mean will always re-appear. Be patient, and wait for the whole cycle to happen, before making drastic decisions.

Uncertainty is naturally scary and it makes people jump to comforting conclusions.